<Begin Segment 18>

DN: Can you describe that for us?

EH: Okay. Well, I'm sitting by the window in the bus all by myself, more or less. And I seen these guys wavin' their hands at me. And I looked out the window, well, here were the two Koba boys. And I hadn't seen them since high school, which had been couple, two, three years by then, I guess. So I rolled the window down and we're hangin' onto one another, and talking about old times back home. Bus driver says, "Gotta shut the window, we're gonna leave." So I said goodbye to the boys, and didn't find out where they lived in Moses Lake. So I never, I've never seen 'em again. And no sooner we got started, and this some smart So-and-so said, made a nasty remark about the Japanese kids, and that they were not welcome. So I stood up, and I says, "You know," says, "those kids were born on Bainbridge Island, if you know where Bainbridge Island is. It's right in the state of Washington outside of Seattle. And I grew up with 'em, went through high school, grade school and high school with these kids, and they're just as 'white' as everybody on this bus." And from then on, complete silence. And nobody, the guy who said it didn't have the guts enough to come back and say, "I'm sorry." But it was very, very quiet all the way to Seattle. And that was about a three or four hour trip. But...

DN: That's one of the, did that strike you at the time -- not just that incident on the bus -- but that was the whole thing about the internment, was that people didn't seem to understand that there's a difference between the Japanese in Japan, and American citizens.

EH: Well, they, they evidently didn't know. But they got found out when I told them that they were born on Bainbridge. And I came home, got my car, went back, and I wish I had found out where they were, because there were four families from the Island that were there. And I'd have, I'd have gone over and visited all of them, if it was that close. But then from Ephrata, then I got sent to Geiger Field in Spokane, and that's where I got in the 1901st Aviation Engineers, and that's when we went overseas. Came back to Seattle, spent two weeks at Fort Lawton loading and unloading -- we had, our battalion took three LSTs to load all of our engineer equipment.

DN: And LST is...

EH: Landing Ship Tank.

DN: Okay.

EH: They're about three hundred and, three hundred and thirty feet long, something like that. And the reason we had to, we had to load, lash 'em down, and then unload. Because what we were in training for was to... when we hit the beach, to get everything off of the LST in less than a half an hour. Which we couldn't. [Laughs] But that's another story.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.